And in the Big News today from a Faith Perspective, the Big Question we’re all asking, why is Christianity falling down the religious popularity charts in the UK compared to Islam?
Christianity tells us that the Invisible Magic Friend condemned us all to damnation unless the second third of the Invisible Magic Friend became temporarily visible by being born from a virgin, sacrificed himself to himself and then rose from the dead before floating up into the sky to eventually become invisible again and leaving some men on earth with the magic power to make copies of him out of bread and wine, with the ability to pass this magic power on to other men by saying some magic words.
I mean, what could be more believable than that?
Platitude of the Day 
And how many times do you have to eat the magic bread and wine before you’ve eaten a whole Jesus?
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Spot on, Rev Dr Dr.
Tim’s massive pious blind spot manifests itself yet again; Christianity is not in decline though apathy, but sheer indifference. It’s superfluous baggage, the belief that even the most beautiful gardens need to have angels living amongst the flowers (hat tip to Douglas Adams).
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I think it was someone on here who told me the joke.
Admirer to gardener: “What a wonderful garden. You and the Almighty have created something truly beautiful.”
Gardener: “Yes, but you should have seen the state of it when it was just the Almighty looking after it.”
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The gardeners interlocutor was the vicar.
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This version of Dim is the ‘yeah, fine, whatever’ easy-going guy who’s inclusive and welcomes buildings’ change of IMF. Who needs churches if market forces cant’ sustain them?
A previous version of Dim displayed an addict’s pain of needing a fix when he spoke of the pain of being denied a magic space to eat & drink Mr Jesus. That Dim would want all churches to stay open rather than prevent someone from ‘suffering’ like he claimed.
Why the change? Did ‘going cold turkey’ help him to a new, enlightened viewpoint? Or is he channeling his inner-Giles in wanting to subvert expectations?
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DDave. The change is just natural for anyone who is a wooly minded thinker. Their minds make up stuff, their imaginings are accepted as reality, their beliefs whilst being fixed on god are fluid in their detail. I bet if you had the time you could pick any TftDer assemble all their TftD scripts and find glaring inconsistencies. Stuff you make up on the fly is usually very hard to reproduce with and consistency months later.
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What a terrible notion … ones inner-Giles. I hope its not catching.
The human mind is a marvelous thing dont you think? I often wonder what it is like to be an implacable believer. What must go on in a mind so absolutely unwavering in its assertion that god actually exists? I used to work with a chap who was a bit sloppy in his work and rather vague on any topic of discussion and quite easily convinced to any accept a point if well argued. Except on two things. His firmly fixed notion that Wigan is the best Rugby Club and his belief in god. I dont give a toss about Rugby but I spent a lot of time trying to get him to explain to me why he believes in god and why I should. It was impossible to get through … god just is, god just has to be, look around you, where did this all come from, you cant get this from nothing, you cant prove god isnt real … an impenetrable wall of faith. Very disturbing.
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And the Lord (*) said unto them, “Blessed are those who believe, for they shall be exalted among men, and shall have riches and joy everlasting.”
(*) Shaun Wane
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It seems to have taken him a while to realise that Christianity is dying out. When I was a lad in the early 1970s the congregation at the chapel consisted of our family and about three old ladies.
My daughter has a friend who is a Muslim, she is as devoutly religious as I am.
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Dim Stanley mutters about ‘agnosticism’ about Christianity in the 19th century. It was both more and less than that. Around the middle of the century, the CofE came within a whisker of being disestablished; but there was still plenty of Nonconformist piety around, especially in Wales and the North. Still, it is interesting to speculate about the outcome if disestablishment had happened (quite possibly no church schools, for a start).
Dim also repeated the claim that there has been an upsurge of interest in religion since the lockdown. Let’s see the evidence. Christians claim that people have been turning to prayer in droves; but at least one poll suggests that more people have stopped praying during lockdown than have started
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SJP Quite right … where is the evidence. At long last a substantial number of ordinary normal people have realised that when a cleric speaks, normally to assert something, they really should question that cleric on the veracity of the assertion and absolutely not accept it just because a cleric uttered it. Clerics have been rumbled … any authority and credibility they once weilded, usually by virtue of threats of divine displeasure, has been squandered. “Seek the truth and thou shalt be free” hollered the holy man. “Yeah right, and I will not be seeking from you.” It seems to me that many people group clerics in with politicians, estate agents and petty criminals … a categorisation that has some merit.
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